The Music of Your Life

by John Rowell

  “Brett hates pink, Mother!” moans Marcy in the other room.

  “William, please help!” Claire calls out to me. “You have to help me with my imposs ible child!”

  “Saturday’s perfect. His name is Ethan, by the way.”

  “I’ll look forward to it. Come up anytime in the afternoon.”

  “Thank you, Auntie Mame,” he says, and then adds: “Your little Patrick loves you, you know.”

  After dinner—a Southern meal of ham, potatoes, and black-eyed peas, Toby’s suggestion—the three of us retire to my combination glassed-in sunporch and TV room for our mini film festival.

  With Toby’s and my permission, Ethan, the dear boy, has been given the right to commandeer the VCR’s remote control for the evening. Toby and I don’t need to stop the tape over and over to look for me, to try and figure out if it’s really me, to try and see how I’ve aged, or depreciated, or whatever forty years has done to me. We both know. The fun, I suppose, is in seeing a new person get clued in to the old joke. That’s the subtitle to tonight’s screening: Old Lyme, Old Joke, New Face.

  And, oh, what a nice new face it is. Toby hadn’t elaborated; either he didn’t want to boast, or he didn’t want his old uncle to get too excited at the prospect of his handsome new boyfriend coming to spend the weekend in Connecticut. The boys—I say boys, my God, Toby’s getting near to thirty, though I surmise Ethan is somewhat younger—are sitting close together on the couch; Toby holds the hand Ethan isn’t using to freeze-frame. I’m watching from my recliner (a very un-gay-like piece of furniture, I’m told by my au courant friends who know these things, but I say: I’m old, it’s comfortable, fuck ’em).

  Just as in any proper screening room, the only light comes from the screen itself. The black-and-white illumination from my big Trinitron set flickers across their faces in the darkness. I confess that I no longer enjoy watching these old things—it makes me feel a little like Norma Desmond holed up on Sunset Boulevard—but I never seem able to say no to Toby when he calls up with a new reason for wanting to watch it again in my presence. I believe he uses the fact of my years in Hollywood, especially the Lucy episode, as a little cachet to impress new or potentially new boyfriends, which I actually find rather sweet, though he certainly doesn’t need me to impress or attract other people. This is the third boyfriend for whom the two of us have screened “Lucy Gets in Pictures,” always here on the sunporch, always in the same configuration: the two of them sitting together on the couch, me sitting alone in my chair, watching them watch the TV. Oh, I worry about Toby; God bless him, he’s had trouble keeping the beaux. It runs in the family, I suppose.

  He keeps looking over at me to see if I’m OK with this. All we have to do is meet each other’s glance to understand what the other wants to communicate. It’s been that way with us ever since he was a child. I should have known then that he would turn out to be gay. Actually, I must have known instinctually all along; I was giving him books of poetry when he was five and six, A Child’s Walt Whitman, A Garden Verse of Emily Dickinson, which he loved, and then later, for Christmas, bestowing him with signed 8 x 10 glossies of stars I knew, or had known briefly—he would always frame them meticulously for the wall of his room. I finally got it, slowpoke that I am, when, for his twelfth birthday, he asked me for the cast albums of Company and Follies.

  While he was in college, he finally confessed his sexual preference to me, and I, of course, in turn told him all about myself. Toby was the first person in my family I ever confided in, face to face, though I’m sure most of them had figured things out by then, whether they accepted me or not. And Toby had made it easy for me; he was the brave one, he said it first. All I had to do was say back to him: “Me too.” We cried, hugged, laughed; then we traded stories about Cousin Starla Scott and what Toby called her “Legacy of Tackiness.”

  “Oh … My … God,” Ethan says very deliberately, sounding almost as though he has rehearsed the response. He is transfixed by what he’s watching: a bunch of leggy showgirls on a set of stairs, and one funny redhead falling all over them. Toby pointed me out immediately to Ethan as soon as the scene began—]second girl from the top, upper right-hand corner. “This is so awesome. I can’t believe it.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say, because after the scads of gay men who have been let in on this little secret and have watched this episode in my presence, I can no longer muster up the energy to voice even the old standby responses. “There you have it.”

  “You were a great-looking showgirl, Mr. Ford,” Ethan continues, and I see Toby looking at him, expectantly. I understand the difficult position Toby’s in: He wants me to like Ethan, he wants Ethan to like me, and he knows there’s a chance that might not happen in either direction. The Auntie Mame curse!

  Ethan turns to study me. He has intense blue eyes and a blond buzz cut, and three small gold studs in his right ear—probably a tiny little revolt against his über-WASP Greenwich upbringing. (We even discovered over dinner that he went to college in Hartford with Marcy Tillinghast. “Connecticut is such a small state,” he offered, as though he were saying something original; his forced “acid” tones sounded more rehearsed than spontaneous. He seemed more honest when he added: “And Marcy—what a Neanderthal bitch!” which, though it’s true, I still found rather unmannerly, and not, I surmise, the type of dinner conversation his Greenwich parents would approve of.)

  Toby eyes our exchange tightly, though he knows I’d never be less than gentlemanly to his friend. It’s probably Ethan being ungentlemanlike to me that he’s more worried about. Relax, Toby.

  “I’m thinking …” Ethan says, in a faux-scholarly tone that I’m sure he doesn’t think is faux at all, “that you were probably a very, very attractive man when you were that age.” I throw Ethan an unchecked look of daggers, which Toby also happens to catch. There’s a palpable moment of frozen silence, so Ethan immediately begins to sputter: “I mean,” he says quickly, in what is decidedly not the scholarly tone, “that you probably had your pick of any man in Hollywood. I mean, not that you still wouldn’t, you know … um …”

  It’s like watching someone drowning, and you choose not to save them.

  “Ethan,” Toby says in a low and embarrassed voice. What I feel most keenly is not the pinprick from Ethan’s implication that I’m a has-been in the looks department, but Toby’s disappointment in Ethan’s own pompous lack of manners.

  “Well, I think I did all right in my time, as I recall,” I say.

  I’m pretty sure I see Toby kick Ethan’s foot. But then they giggle together, and Ethan gives Toby a spontaneous kiss, and then suddenly, the room becomes their room; they have seized a private moment, forgetting that I’m still here. I glance away, feeling like an onlooker in my own home.

  “Well, I think you’re still very attractive, Mr. Ford,” Ethan says, after they break, words tumbling unmonitored from his dimpled mouth, “it’s just that you made such a … well, pretty woman.”

  “Thank you, Ethan. I think.”

  “He went out with Rock Hudson,” says Toby, and I wince inwardly when he brings this up, though I realize he’s probably said it to come to my defense.

  “Oh … My … God. Is that actually true?” says Ethan, back in his studied manner again.

  “It was one date. Well, two. Really, Toby, you know it wasn’t that big of a deal, and it was … please, it was thirty years ago.”

  “I’m extremely curious about that, Mr. Ford,” Ethan says.

  “I’m sure you are,” says Toby, a hint of warning in his voice. “And you can call him Will.”

  “Yes, please do, Ethan. I really don’t want to play the chaperone.”

  Ethan rewinds the tape so that we can watch Lucy falling down for the one hundred millionth time.

  “What a genius she was,” Ethan says, and I suppress an urge to roll my eyes upward. “I really believe she was, like, the Sarah Bernhardt of American television.”

  “What exactly is it that you do again,
Ethan?” I say, though my hunger for this particular piece of knowledge isn’t exactly overwhelming.

  “Well,” he says. “I’m in film school at NYU. Second year. I thought I had mentioned that. Anyway, you can see why I’m so interested in all of this.”

  “Film school. Of course.”

  “That’s funny,” says Toby in a tone that sounds only half kidding. “I thought you were interested in this because it had something to do with me.” And he playfully takes a swipe at Ethan’s blond head, which, now that I look at it, I realize is kind of bullet shaped, not traditionally pretty-boy perfect. Good. He needed humanizing.

  “Ouch. That. Hurt,” Ethan says, in what sounds like the deliberate flat tone of a robot in old ’50s sci-fi films. “Please. Don’t. Do. That. Again.”

  “You’re an asshole,” whispers Toby, and leans down and kisses the place he just swatted. “Can I get anybody another drink?”

  “Merlot?” says Ethan, back in rewind phase.

  “Uncle Will?”

  “Nothing for me, Toby.”

  He goes off, and Ethan and I sit in silence as Desi (Dessie) enters the scene.

  “Lucy! What do you think you’re doing?” he bellows from the screen, and the studio audience emits an unseen cloud of laughter. The showgirls look at each other in the background and titter mildly. I notice what’s-her-name … God, what was her name, the lesbian? Oh well. She keeps glancing my way in the scene, trying, I guess, to make some sort of eye contact, something I certainly hadn’t noticed at the time. She really must have been into me from the get-go. God. Where on earth would she be now? Oh, if I had only been able to tell her right then and there what the deal was. I’ve thought about that many times over the years. She might have gotten a big kick out of it. Or not.

  “Will,” Ethan says, Toby-less from the sofa. “Tobias said you can also be seen in a film with John Wayne, is that true?”

  “Yes, that’s true, believe it or not. John Wayne, of all people. The Searchers.”

  “Directed by John Ford. Very impressive. Any relation?”

  “Yes. He was my grandfather.”

  “Oh my God,” he says, and this little tidbit seems to get him in a tizzy. “I can’t believe Toby didn’t mention—”

  “I’m kidding, Ethan.”

  And his mouth opens slightly, then closes again, trying to figure me out. Then he smiles wanly, though rather condescendingly; it’s clear he realizes that, well, yes, I’ve kind of gotten him back, and he turns his pretty, self-involved gaze back to the television.

  “I’m very interested in traditional Hollywood portrayals of masculinity,” he says, composed and scholarly once more. “I’m actually writing my thesis on it. I don’t know if Tobias told you that. And, of course, Wayne is a huge benchmark in this particular area.”

  Toby returns with a tray of three drinks. He carries it beautifully, like the Manhattan cater-waiter he sometimes has to be when his freelance magazine assignments get scarce.

  “Brought you a vodka soda anyway,” he says, and as he hands me the drink, he leans down and kisses me on the forehead. “Thanks for being patient,” he whispers. I wink no problem, and he rejoins Ethan on the couch, scooting in, I notice, even closer this time.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of The Searchers around, would you, Will?” Ethan asks. “I’d really like to see you in it. Of course, I’ve studied the film several times, but that was before I met you.”

  “Yes, Ethan, I do, as a matter of fact, being such a huge fan of John Wayne’s. He was my all-time favorite actor, you know, he was so brilliant, such a consummate interpreter of text, really, and, of course, politically, he represented everything I stand for.”

  Ethan is clearly not quite sure how to take anything I say at this point. Toby glances nervously at me with his What the hell are you doing, Uncle Will? look.

  “I’m kidding, Ethan. Again.” For all their supposed sophistication, sometimes the younger generation just doesn’t seem to grasp irony. Or maybe what they understand is post-irony, and I’m still stuck in irony. Or sarcasm. “Yes, I have the damn Searchers,” I say, suddenly feeling testy and—mildewed. “I’m in three very minor scenes, and Toby knows exactly where they are.”

  Toby goes over to the video cabinet and finds The Searchers, and begins to switch the tapes in the VCR.

  “John Ford mastered quite a few genres, didn’t he?” Ethan begins, as if giving a lecture. “There was the western, of course, of which I believe he was the undisputed master. Then, the war films, What Price Glory, Mister Roberts …”

  CALIFORNIA, 1955

  “Why can’t they get this stupid shot set up, anyway?” I say to Luke, who’s definitely become my best friend on the set of this picture. We’re on location, in the desert, near Baja. “We’ve been waiting forever.” I’ve done enough extra work by now to talk shop, the way I used to hear other extras carrying on when I was just starting out. I was always too intimidated to say anything myself back then.

  “Sure seems like it,” says Luke. He and I have gotten along real well since we met a couple of weeks ago, when we got hired as extras in the new John Wayne picture. He’s a southern boy too, from South Carolina. Told me nobody in his family has had anything to do with him since he left the farm two years ago to come to Hollywood. “They didn’t have too much to do with me before that, anyhow,” he said, “so it don’t make all that much of a difference.”

  Luke’s just about everything I like in another guy: he’s handsome, looks kind of like a young Clark Gable, but in a down-home sort of way, big ol’ movie-star grin and these wide-set brown eyes that are just perfect for staring off onto the prairie in the final shot of a western—no wonder he got hired! I told him I thought he had what it took to be a big star, and he smiled at me sheepishly and chucked me under the chin, then slapped me on the back. Much as I hate to admit it, that little gesture sent a hot rush all the way through me, and endeared him to me like crazy, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him since, even in bed at night with Arthur. I feel pretty guilty about that, so I’ve been trying to make myself not think so much about Luke. At least at night.

  The things I don’t tell Luke are: that I was a showgirl on I Love Lucy last year, and that Arthur is my special friend. (Arthur says we’re “lovers,” but somehow I can’t learn to use that word.) Arthur is the second assistant director on this movie—he helped me get the job; out here, it’s always who you know—and he’s also personally in charge of handling Mr. Wayne. This means the two of us have to be real, real careful about the way we act around each other on the set. Arthur has basically said we should behave kind of like we don’t even know each other, or like we’re just friendly, working acquaintances. (“But you know I love you, Willie. You know that, right? Who loves you, Willie? Huh? Who loves you?”) Fine with me, I guess—it gives me more freedom to spend time with Luke. Besides, Arthur’s been real edgy on this picture. He’s afraid that big he-man types like Mr. Wayne and John Ford will think he’s “light in the loafers” (that’s how he put it) if he’s not careful. But I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on him; he’s promised me he’ll get Mr. Wayne to autograph a picture to my brother Aaron, who loves the “Duke” more than anything. I would have asked Mr. Wayne myself, but on this picture word has come down that no extras are allowed to approach the stars unless approached or spoken to first.

  “That Natalie Wood sure is growing up to be a pretty girl,” Luke whispers to me, as Natalie walks past us-friendly but shy—with her on-set tutor on the way to her trailer. We’re still in our cowboy outfits, and hanging out in the little coffee and doughnut tent that the production people have set up for day players and bit-part players. Luke and I both got upgraded yesterday when one of the AD’s made us part of a posse of five. This means that I’ve graduated from the extras tent, which is nice, because the extras tent is usually a much farther walk from the set. I should know; that’s where I’ve been on my last two pictures.

  “Yeah, she�
��s pretty, all right,” I say. “But lots of girls in Hollywood are pretty. Besides, she’s too young for you, Luke. She’s jailbait.”

  “Shit, in Hollywood there ain’t no such thing as jailbait,” he says, and we both laugh hard at this. “If she’s jailbait, then you are too, Pretty Boy.” Pretty Boy. Those words just kind of hang there for a few moments; they ring in my ear.

  “Well, still,” I say back, finally. “You better keep your distance there, pardner.” I mean from Natalie Wood, of course; I hope he doesn’t think I mean from me. I wouldn’t want Luke to be distant at all, even though I know I should.

  And he grins up at me, then laughs and claps me hard on the back, which sends another hot little shiver running all the way through my body. I don’t know why he makes me feel like this; sometimes I can’t even look at him, and sometimes I can’t stop looking at him.

  In the distance, we can see all the cables, the riggings, the light poles, the crew running around, fixing things, the extras hovering all around. Mr. Ford confers with the first AD, who then barks something at Arthur, who then runs around and barks at everybody else. Arthur is not a barker most of the time; I guess he thinks that being gruff and loud makes him look more manly in the presence of Mr. Ford and Mr. Wayne. Maybe so, but it sure doesn’t make him more likable. At least not to me.

  “Do you date many girls out here, Will?” Luke asks, in his deep, country-boy voice, but wearing a puppyish expression on his face.

  “Nah, I don’t have much time. I have a job at a flower shop, too, when I’m not working in the movies.”

  He studies me a bit, but says nothing.

  From the PA system: “THE SHOT IS NOW SET. WILL ALL PRINCIPALS, KEY PLAYERS, AND BACKGROUND REPORT TO THE SET AT THIS TIME?”

  It’s Arthur on the loudspeaker, of course. I can tell he tries to make his voice more manly when he speaks on that thing.

  Luke and I go to mount our horses, although we won’t be riding them. In this scene, Mr. Wayne and his men receive instructions from a “friendly posse” (that’s us, that’s how they call us in the shooting script—Luke kept calling it “friendly pussy”) on how to reach the next town beyond the mountain range, so the shot here is all talk, no riding. Luke and I are side by side on horseback in the shot, and all we have to do is pay attention to the principals; one of the other posse guys has the lines. Mr. Wayne emerges from his trailer, in full makeup and with a white protective cloth tied under his chin. He is helped onto his horse by two assistants. It’s Arthur, in fact, who runs up to untie Mr. Wayne’s makeup cloth, and I try to catch his eye, but he doesn’t look over at me, just attends to Mr. Wayne and rushes off. I decide to not feel guilty about paying so much attention to Luke after all.